China’s ‘foreign hand’ behind Xinjiang terror attacks could be barely real
Hindustan Times, 17 September 2013
In China, if the ‘Dalai Lama clique’ and Tibetan Youth League are blamed for triggering trouble in Tibet, the culprit behind the sporadic violence across the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is inevitably the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM).
The other groups
termed culpable are exiled Uyghur groups operating from abroad, said to be working as the front for ETIM.
But experts and rights group have expressed serious doubts how serious the ETIM threat actually is; some have termed it bordering on fiction, especially about the al-Qaeda connections.
It is routine for the state-controlled media and strategic experts to claim that ETIM members, many of them trained in an unnamed South Asian country return to Xinjiang to incite locals against the authorities. Their final goal – an independent country for the largely Muslim Uyghur community, more than 8 million of whom live in Xinjiang.
Dozens of Uyghur men have recently been sentenced to death for their involvement with the ETIM and creating unrest in the remote region. Evidence is apparently mostly based on literature found on the suspects and confessions.
Recently, a top security analyst in China defined the ETIM role to foreign and Chinese journalists in an interaction.
‘The direct and immediate (terrorism) threat that China faces is from the ETIM. The series of terrorist attacks have taken place in Xinjiang, impacted regional stability and development,” Li Wei, director of the Institute for Security and Arms Control Studies, said.
The ETIM’s main aim at present, according to Li, is to “cause instability and panic in the region.”
“These are terrorist forces closely related to forces outside. They do not hide in one place, which is a challenge for the Chinese government,” Li said.
That challenge is vastly exaggerated, two experts told HT.
“In short, yes, it is a fiction! There is no room for large-scale organisation of any resistance in Xinjiang and in fact between 2001 and 2009 the number incidents of unrest in Xinjiang was lower than the average for the rest of China! Making small bombs is cheap and easy. If someone wanted to do so they could,” David Tobin, lecturer on politics at Glasgow University and researcher on Xinjiang told HT over email.
Tobin added that more the party-state arbitrarily labels all discontent as “terrorism” the more Han residents are frightened and likely to turn to violence to defend themselves and the more Uyghurs feel they have no other outlet to express themselves, violence will continue.
Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch (HRW) called the ETIM issue a complicated one but added that there was little evidence of cross border support. He said the US terming it as a terrorist group around a decade ago was “embarrassing.”
“China is certainly not facing threat from Islamic group supported by the Al Qaeda. The source of the anti-state violence is domestic. But Beijing’s policies could create a real terrorism problem. (Polices should ensure that) Islamic terrorism should not become appealing to Uyghurs,” Bequelin told HT.